Word: potomac
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Your entertaining and enlightening footnote on the sporting interests of our Presidents [Nov. 9] could do with a little amplification in the field of halieutics. George Washington's Diary records his frequent dealings with the perch and catfish of the Potomac River. Thomas Jefferson, accompanied by his Secretary of State and successor, James Madison, traveled 300 miles by coach to fish for trout in ... Lake George. Chester Arthur knew his way to the salmon pools of New Brunswick. Grover Cleveland, an authority on black bass, wrote one of the most delightful of angling books [Fishing and Hunting Sketches...
Bruce Catton is a journalist (the Nation) who has spent three years making the Civil War sound as fresh and exciting as if it had been fought yesterday. In A Stillness at Appomattox, he ends the story of the Army of the Potomac that he began with Mr. Lincoln's Army and continued with Glory Road. Once again, without stinting the strategies of the generals, he digs into regimental histories and private diaries to create a lively sense of the common soldier performing his uncommon chore of fighting and dying...
...privates who dubbed the Army of the Potomac "Grant's army" after the day in March 1864 when the man with the bristly red beard and black sugarloaf hat came to visit the army's nominal commander, Meade. Grant was something of a mystery to this army. His breakfast was a cucumber sliced in vinegar and a cup of coffee; if he ate meat, it had to be cooked black, and he never started the daily round without two dozen cigars stowed in his pockets...
Hard-Bitten Veterans. The Army of the Potomac was less of a mystery to Grant. He knew that a handful of bumbling leaders-from McDowell to Hooker -had given it a galloping inferiority complex about Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. By 1864, not only morale but men were ebbing away as their enlistments came to an end. Yet Grant pinned his faith on hard-bitten veterans like the soldier who said: "They use a man here just the same as they do a turkey at a shooting match, fire at it all day and if they...
...preferred riding. Jefferson detested all exercise, relaxed with his violin. Theodore Roosevelt, the most active President, was an enthusiastic wrestler, jujitsu expert, big-game hunter, tennist, horseman and boxer. One of his favorite forms of exercise was point-to-point hiking, which sometimes involved swimming Rock Creek or the Potomac River. "If we swam the Potomac," T.R. recalled in his autobiography, "we usually took off our clothes. I remember one such occasion when the French ambassador, Jusserand . . . was along, and, just as we were about to get in to swim, somebody said, 'Mr. Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, you haven...